Graphic Violence

by Mike Rogers

Felipe Dibujo, graphic artist — hey, he drew for the comic-books, but he could be proud of his skills, couldn’t he? — was in a state of mind that wasn’t altogether normal but, as is normal for people in that kind of state, he wasn’t aware of it. All he could do was respond to the stimuli presented and try to make sense of them.

His eyes weren’t open. His head was sideways on the desk. Whatever he thought he was perceiving, he wasn’t perceiving it in the normal way. There was a light. There were shapes. He spent his working day creating shapes, manipulating them, placing them in relationship to one another, giving them a meaning which other people grasped, not necessarily understood in a rational way but grasped emotionally, instinctively.

But then, the people who grasped them weren’t nearly as close to them, in a physical sense, as he was. They had a distance which let them see some ellipses as eyes, others as mouths, curves as eyebrows, and so on. When you’re close, all you see are abstract shapes, which may feel familiar, but aren’t recognised, certainly not when you’ve modified your consciousness in a particular way which is supposed to let you pierce through the veil of illusion. But it’s the veil of illusion that gives conventional meaning to all these conventional signs which are the human way of depicting in two dimensions things that really exist in three.

Maybe that was why he was finding it so difficult to make sense of what he “saw”; not just because he wasn’t seeing it through his eyes, which were still closed, but because he had, in some sense, become part of the two-dimensional world.

Movement through it was difficult. He was used to moving in three dimensions, so he had to adapt. He slid sideways, passing across the edge of black outlines with colour inside, though the colour was made up of dots, three different colours in different proportions, so that if you let your eyes go a little bit out of focus, you could more or less see another colour which wasn’t any of the three, but a kind of combination.

Then he came to solid colour: still dots, but effectively solid colour. “Red,” that was the name that came to him. Bold, bright, it stood out from the background and occupied a considerable space.

Then, suddenly, there was a different bright, bold, outstanding colour: “blue.” It, too, occupied a considerable space, blotting out all the smaller black and white shapes behind, the ones he was now beginning to recognise as depictions of human forms, the ones he sensed — felt - knew — were like him, though he was also beginning to realise that resemblance was not the same thing as identity. Unlike them, he had the power of independent movement. Those others struck him as somehow vulnerable.

There was one among them which seemed somehow terribly familiar to him, as if he had been in some sense still was... in close proximity to it, as if they fitted together. He had a desire to protect it, to move the pair of them to somewhere less exposed, farther away from the other shapes and certainly away from the solid colours, not totally hidden because, if no light reached you, then you didn’t exist, but certainly — how might one put it? — out of harm’s way. Once he’d done that, he relaxed, there seemed no reason to move any more, and his awareness slipped away.

Felipe Dibujo slowly returned to a consciousness with which he was depressingly and reluctantly familiar. The bitterness of peyote was still in his mouth, on his lips. Had he vomited? He opened his eyes. What filled his vision was Superman, the blaring red of the cape and y-fronts, the smug blue of the costume, the dashes of brash yellow around the insignia on the chest. It was too close to focus on.

Fortunately, his head was beside it and not on it and, even more fortunately, it was a galley-proof and not an original. Leo would have been really mad if he’d got even the slightest spot on the art-work. Sure, Leo was only the colourist, and he, Felipe, did the drawing, but nonetheless you could understand how he felt.

“Felipe! Waddayou doin’, you goddam lousy halfbreed?!”

Damn. He was going to have to hear how Leo felt.

The angry colourist switched the anglepoise, the only illumination in the bare and angular room, from the galley-proof to Felipe’s face. Felipe could feel his assaulted pupils shrinking, and the blood vessels in his head constricted in sympathy to cast a tightening net of pain from nape to crown.

“Why d’you have to take that stuff? That Jimson weed?”

“It’s not jimson weed,” said Felipe, trying to control a tongue that felt three times too big for his mouth and as dry as Death Valley. “It’s peyote, proper stuff, I brought it back from a cousin of my tia, last time I was south of the border. Jimson is for trailer trash. This stuff is part of my religion, from when I was a Mexican Native American.”

“Yeah? Well, I worship Saint James Beam, and he’s never thrown me a curved one yet. You look terrible. And why d’ya do it here, anyway?”

“My woman don’ like it. Your woman like you bein’ friends with Jimmy?”

“Men gotta do what men gotta do,” said Leo, slipping a two-thirds-full bottle of bourbon out of his deep trenchcoat pocket and putting it on the desk. The bottle caught the light and shed an amber radiance across the galley-proof, like sun through a church window, which drew his attention to something Felipe wished he hadn’t noticed.

“Jeez, you throw up on this or what?”

“It’s the proof, that’s all, and it’s a speck, and besides, you can’t prove it was me.”

“Sure I could, if I wanted to. It’s got your DNA in it, don’ it? That tells me exactly what’s inside you, generations back. All your secret thoughts and desires, even the ones that’s secret from you. And now you wiped it all over your own drawing. Don’t you got no respect for your own work, Felipe?”

“Sure, I got respect for it, sure I put myself into it, just like you do, but...” Felipe hesitated. He’d been working with Leo Rosso for three or four years now, and they got on pretty well. But he wasn’t about to tell him that he, Felipe, took more trouble with the faces in the crowd than anybody ever suspected.

Clark, Lois, Perry White, Lex Luthor, all the rest of the stars: you had to draw them the way they always had been, no sense doing otherwise, there’d be complaints. You could put in a little something of your own, a quizzical look in the eye, an extra wrinkle, though, of course, time never passed in the comics except for changing fashions, hairstyles, automobile design, that stuff. But the people in the background, the suckers who looked up at the sky and didn’t know what was flying overhead, or the ones who screamed as the catastrophe was on the verge of happening, open-mouthed, open-eyed, they were individuals, and he gave them individual faces, even if he only had six or seven lines in which to do it.

Lots of them, he had to admit, had his face, but in different moods, at different ages: with or without facial hair, he’d had a moustache once; with or without glasses, he needed them now for reading and drawing; the way he used to look when he was younger; the way he imagined he would look when he was older.

He’d have used his father as a model for that, if he’d ever known him. Only saw a picture once, in his mother’s handbag when he was rooting for spare nickels and guessed who it was because of what was written on the back of it. And the women: some were his mother; young, old, grimly enough the way she’d looked when he saw her for the last time, in the funeral parlour. Others — most of them — were his woman, mostly the way she’d looked when they first got together. He never used his little girl and boy. Scared, somehow, of what might happen to them. Dangerous world in the comics. Not for the stars, but... “I don’ like where the writer’s takin’ us,” Felipe said.

“How d’ya mean?” asked Leo, getting two plastic cups from the water cooler. The unscrewing of the whiskey bottle’s metal cap made a loud noise in the quiet room. Everything around them was so still that the trickling of the amber liquid could be clearly heard. Leo gestured with the still raised bottle, but Felipe shook his head: “Never mix mash and mush,” he said. “They do different things.”

“How so?” asked Leo. “Not that I’m likely to want to try any of your Aztec fungi.”

“Peyote,” said Felipe, “gives real shape to your ideas and your dreams and your wishes. It gives you consciousness...” He stopped, because he didn’t want to give any more away.

“So it’s not just your Castaneda crap that turns people into bleached bones in Death Valley?”

Felipe shook his head.

“Well, Saint James and his brother, Frère Jacques Daniels, they take away the aches and they loosen things up and they let things out. But you gotta stop before they let out too much. However, seein’ as there ain’t no one to overhear us, you can tell me what you mean about the writer.”

Felipe stood up, took the empty plastic cup, filled it at the water cooler, drained it, refilled it, drained it again, filled it a third time and sat on the table with it beside him, sipping from time to time. “In the old days, Superman stopped people gettin’ hurt. I remember. He flew in before things happened, before the buildin’s got smashed an’ the train crashed. He held the goddam airplane up in the air.”

“And now, I get to do these really cool flame effects, red splashes that might be blood, and debris. Yeah, I get what ya mean. But hell, comics gotta compete with fillums, don’t they? Smash bash crash! Pieces all over the place!”

“But the people I draw, they get crushed to pieces, and I gotta draw it! He wants it! He asks for it! It ain’t my choice. Limbs, right? Severed limbs. He sends me pictures of crashes, so I can get it right.”

“Yeah, I get that. I mean, I have to look at them, too, and in colour. But then, I got Jack and James to help me get over it afterwards.”

“The people I draw are people, and Superman’s an icon. Nothing’s ever gonna happen to him. He’s got bigger. Did you notice? I get told, ‘Put him centre, make him large, hide the crowds behind him; he’s more important than they are. And he’s red and blue, and they’re mostly black and white.”

“Yeah, well, it’s what they want, and they’re payin’ us, ain’t they? They ain’t payin’ us just to please ourselves, that’s for sure.”

“That is for sure,” agreed Felipe. He emptied the plastic cup, crushed it and tossed it beyond the table into the wastebasket by the water cooler.

Leo copied him and moved to the door. “Home?” he said.

“Home,” agreed Felipe. “I’ll get the light.”

He heard Leo’s steps receding down the corridor, and the distant hum of the elevator being summoned and the ping as it arrived. Meanwhile, he’d turned the anglepoise back on to the proof.

There was the frame he’d seen when he came round. Below it were two frames of carnage, the crowd fleeing in all directions, but not fleeing fast enough. But something was different.

Two figures in the first frame, before all hell broke loose, weren’t where he’d put them. They were right at the back now, out of reach of the crashing aircraft and the train that had jumped the tracks of the elevated and plunged down into the street. He remembered having had to draw their legs sticking out from underneath the wreckage, like the Wicked Witch in Oz. He checked the two frames below. They weren’t in either of them.

“Come on, Felipe! Someone else is calling the elevator!”

“With you!” he called back, looking at the first frame again. The speck on the face of the man had dried, but was still just visible. It looked as though it might have leached across a little on to the woman beside him. He smiled. He didn’t need to understand, just be glad. He turned out the light and left the room.

It wasn’t true, though, that if there was no light you simply didn’t exist.